Turkish, spoken by over 200 million people, is the seventh-most spoken tongue among almost 4,000 languages spoken in the world today.

Turks have used many different alphabets since the eight century, but the most enduring ones were the Göktürk, Uigur, Arabic and finally the Roman alphabets. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, aiming to reach a contemporary level of civilization, ensured in 1928 that the modified Roman alphabet characters chosen to suit Turkish phonetics were adopted to replace the Arabic script.

Atatürk also spearheaded the foundation of the Turkish Language Research Association in 1932 in order keep from to purify the Turkish language from Arabic and Persian words and make it grammatically simpler and lexically purer. The association, later named the Turkish Language Society, took important steps in hammering out contemporary Turkish. This society was transferred into the Atatürk Cultural, Linguistic and Historical Supreme Council in 1983. Atatürk's language reform was highly successful and popular. Consequently, the ratio of Turkish words used in written language, 35-40% before 1932, has now reached 75-80%.